From the viewpoint of what is species typical and what fosters optimal normal development, artificial formula in infancy is malnourishment. Our ancestral practices until relatively recently was several years of breastfeeding. After the breastfeeding years, our ancestors did not eat three meals a day but ate from the abundance and nutritionally-rich sources of the natural world as they migrated cyclically to find those sources. Even during the last 10,000 years or so of civilization, the materially poor usually derived good nutrition from their own gardens, hunting and gathering—until in the 16th century these common lands were taken away by the elites who enclosed the lands for their own monetary benefit (see Stoll, 2018).

Chlorpyrifos [used on fruits and vegetables kids eat, with efforts to ban it] is just one of 12 toxic chemicals Landrigan and Grandjean say are having grim effects on fetal brain development. Their new study is similar to a review the two researchers published in 2006, in the same journal, identifying six developmental neurotoxins. Only now they describe twice the danger: The number of chemicals that they deemed to be developmental neurotoxins had doubled over the past seven years. Six had become 12. Their sense of urgency now approached panic. “Our very great concern,” Grandjean and Landrigan wrote, “is that children worldwide are being exposed to unrecognized toxic chemicals that are silently eroding intelligence, disrupting behaviors, truncating future achievements and damaging societies.”

… Grandjean and Landrigan note in their research that rates of diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder and ADHD are increasing, and that neurobehavioral development disorders currently affect 10 to 15 percent of births. They add that “subclinical decrements in brain function”—problems with thinking that aren’t quite a diagnosis in themselves—“are even more common than these neurobehavioral development disorders.”

James Hamblin, author of The Atlantic article excerpts above, noted that the cause of toxicity in food and other products was “a broken system that allows industrial chemicals to be used without any significant testing for safety. The greater concern lies in what we’re exposed to and don’t yet know to be toxic.”

So mothers’ and children’s nutrition includes the ingestion of toxic chemicals that undermine child physical and mental health.

If we are going to make America’s children healthy, we need to support breastfeeding, healthy food products and feeding practices, as well as limited use of neurotoxins.